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Thursday, December 8, 2016

This is Day 22 of my serialized blog about the Rainblo-Batman Custom Comic entitled “Batman: Born on the Fourth of July”, which I pencilled in the spring of 1994. Each day’s post will include the plot outline, the finished script (when I have it), my roughs, and my pencils. I can’t include images of the pages-as-published as I didn’t receive and have never seen them . If anyone reading this has a copy of the published work, please contact me. If you give or sell me a copy, or send me scans of the published or finished artwork, I will incorporate them into future blog posts.

Today I’m discussing page 26.

This is one of my favorite pages in the comic, not so much for the art (though it must have looked pretty cool with all the blacks spotted— for those not in the know, a technique many comic pencillers use, when spotting blacks, is to indicate all the areas made to be filled in with black with an “X”. This has the benefit of speeding things up for the penciller (who doesn’t have to spend all that time rendering with pencil) and the inker (who doesn’t have to spend all that time erasing the pencil rendering) but for the bi-play between the Tomcat and the Mime doing guard duty in panel one. (This can be read on the rough page). I’d be shocked if this made it into the printed work, but one can hope.

I also like the oblique staging of how Batman overcomes the two guards— panel 2 is just before the Bat-attack , panel 3 is just after. I was channelling Alex Toth when I did this page. Someday I’m going to have to letter and ink it, just for the Hell of it.

RBBM Shotlist pg 26

30) Angle on Lib. Island docks- a Tomcat and a Mime do guard duty- In FG Batman in scuba gear pokes head out of water